‘Absurd, funny and gratuitously graphic’: Kim Noble at Soho Theatre

You’re Not Alone is an hour-long confusing and lonely scream into a very modern void of interpersonal disconnection and identity crises. I’m still trying to work out whether what I saw was genius or madness, and if I enjoyed or endured it; perhaps the only thing I can be certain of is that I’ll never, ever forget it.

Kim Noble is probably the most peculiar man to ever be given a run at Soho Theatre, and I’ve seen Noel Fielding there twice. His show is a video which he narrates and supplements with crowd interaction, and a somehow subtle transition from short curly ginger hair, shirt and jeans to a glittery red frock and blonde wig.

The video is absurd, funny and at times gratuitously graphic. Noble spoke to me before the show to ask if I wouldn’t mind being brought on stage and warning that there are “some distressing bits in the video”. If he had come up to me right before the performance and said “the video will at times make you extremely uncomfortable, queasy and faint” I still would have been concerned that I wasn’t given appropriate notice.

Within a minute of the start of the film Noble begins hacking away at a dead pigeon; later we see him having sex with a watermelon, inserting a bottle into his rectum and having a diarrhoea incident on the floor of a Catholic church (which my Irish roots found particularly offensive).

The work also includes shameless catfishing by Noble and a brazen outing of various scumbags he meets online. Some of the funnier parts of the performance include the use of stealth equipment to monitor his neighbour’s coital patterns and his infiltration of the B&Q staff.

Despite the merciless onslaught of male ejaculation and amateur taxidermy there is (I think) a very pertinent message that permeates this performance art-comedy piece. It’s a turbulent journey, jerking this way and that with seemingly no sense of direction: attempts to engage with those around him such as cleaning his neighbours cars at night or presenting his local Morrisons cashier with various awards are contrasted against random masturbatory episodes.

Upon reflection it appears that the narrative is one of an identity crisis, a cry for human engagement, mirrored in his father’s debilitating dementia which provides solemn punctuation throughout the laughter and silliness.

The show is unpolished, undoubtedly through design, rough around the edges, and at times near-unwatchable. Despite all these things I have to hand it to Kim Noble: You’re Not Alone is one of the most striking pieces of theatre I have seen.

His seemingly futile attempt to hear an echo from his cry for human connection finds a resonance in his audience, and I was helpless but to empathise with this fortysomething child still trying to figure out who he is, where he is and what he is. Superb.

Follow Brendan on Twitter @brendanhodrien